Richard Dawkins has provoked anger after he claimed Muslims have contributed almost nothing to science since the Middle Ages.

The outspoken biologist and atheist wrote on Twitter that a single college at Cambridge University had won more Nobel Prizes than all the world’s Muslims.

His comments sparked fury on the social network where he was accused of disguising his ‘bigotry’ as atheism.

But last night the 72-year-old best-selling author of The God Delusion refused to apologise for his remarks.

The row broke out after he commented: ‘All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge.’ He responded to the barrage of ensuing criticism by telling his 782,000 followers: ‘A statement of simple fact is not bigotry. And science by Muslims was great in the distant past.’

In response to one Twitter user who pointed out that Muslims had been responsible for algebra and ‘alchemy’, Professor Dawkins replied: ‘Indeed, where would we be without alchemy? Dark Age achievements undoubted. But since then?’

He sought to justify his controversial observation by adding: ‘Why mention Muslim Nobels rather than any other group? Because we so often hear boasts about (a) their total numbers and (b) their science.’

One angry Twitter user hit out at the remarks telling the author: ‘You absolutely disgust me.’

Writer Owen Jones told the professor: ‘How dare you dress your bigotry up as atheism. You are now beyond an embarrassment.’

But some users noted that the criticism of Professor Dawkins was in marked contrast to that when he has made comments about Christianity.

One wrote: ‘Dawkins spent the best part of 10 years attacking Christianity and not raising an eyebrow. He now turns that same eye on Islam and uproar.’

An Emeritus Fellow at New College, Oxford, Professor Dawkins appeared to try and appease his critics by saying that Trinity College also has more Nobel Prizes than any country in the world except America, Britain, Germany and France

WHO TOPS THE NOBEL TABLE?

Trinity College has 32 Nobel laureates, whereas only ten Prize winners are thought to have been Muslims.

Awarded annually since 1901, the Nobel Prize recognises achievements in Physics, Medicine, Chemistry, Peace and Literature, as well as a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

Winners from Trinity include Bertrand Russell who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his 1946 work, ‘A History of Western Philosophy’.

Twelve of the college’s Nobel laureates were recognised for work in physics, eight in chemistry and seven in medicine.

Of the ten Muslim Nobel Laureates, only two are scientists: Pakistani Abdus Salam, who won the Prize for Physics, and the Egyptian-American Ahmed Zewail, who won in Chemistry.

Six were awarded the Peace Prize, including Yasser Arafat.

Half of the ten Muslim laureates were awarded the prize in the 21st century, during which Trinity College has only had one prize winner.

Dawkins didn't pick Trinity at random as the exemplar of the West. Trinity's list of former students is insanely distinguished, as I noted in 2006:

I'm reading a biography of Sir Francis Galton, who attended Trinity College at Cambridge University. I found amusing the biographer's cautious reference to Sir Isaac Newton as "one of Trinity College's most distinguished alumni."

Wouldn't Newton rank as the most distinguished alumni? After all, what other Englishman is as distinguished as Newton (besides Shakespeare, and he didn't go to college)? Newton was calculated to be the most eminent figure in the sciences in human history in Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment.

Still, when I looked up on Wikipedia the list of alumni of Trinity, I could see why the writer didn't want to commit himself. Here are some other Trinity alumni and / or professors besides Newton and Galton:

One thing to keep in mind is that Cambridge and Oxford aren't really the Harvard and Yale of Britain, they're more like the Ivy League and the other Ivy League of Britain, who each all happen to be located in their own ancient small city. The Claremont colleges in Southern California are structured like this, with a half dozen small colleges side-by-side with assets in common, but Claremont is about seven centuries behind Oxford and Cambridge.

Dawkins himself studied at Balliol, Oxford, which has its own list of famous alumni. My vague impression is that Cambridge, with Trinity pre-eminent, tended to be more scientific / intellectual, while Oxford, with perhaps Balliol pre-eminent *, tended to be more political / literary / social / political.

Stereotyping wildly, Cambridge was slightly more progressive and Whig, Oxford slightly more conservative and Tory. Cambridge is northeast of London in flat, swampy country where Puritans once predominated, while Oxford is west of London amidst country estates ideal for foxhunting. To put it in Albion's Seed terms, Cambridge was more like Harvard, Oxford more like the U. of Virginia.

By the way, Dawkins fits my stereotype of evolutionary theorists as smart country boys. The sociology behind British predominance in evolution is that the affluent and the intellectual did not huddle in the cities (at least not year-round), but instead spread out across the countryside and took an interest in wildlife, farming, and scientific breeding.

Dawkins was born in Nairobi, Kenya. His father, Clinton John Dawkins (1915–2010), was an agricultural civil servant in the British colonial service in Nyasaland (now Malawi). ... He returned to England in 1949, when Dawkins was eight. His father had inherited a country estate, Over Norton Park, which he turned into a commercial farm. Both his parents were interested in natural sciences; they answered Dawkins's questions in scientific terms.

Over Norton Park, 22 miles from Oxford, is a mile north of Chipping Norton, a gorgeous town in the Cotswold Hills that has become the country home center of the new Tory elite, the Chipping Norton Set: Prime Minister David Cameron, an Oxford man (PPE at Brasenose College) represents Chipping Norton in the House of Commons.

* No, as a commenter points out, Christ Church outranks even Balliol at Oxford. From Wikipedia:

Like its sister college, Trinity College, Cambridge, it was traditionally considered the most aristocratic college of its university.

Christ Church has produced thirteen British prime ministers, which is equal to the number produced by all 45 other Oxford colleges put together and more than any Cambridge college (and two short of the total number for the University of Cambridge, fifteen).

For example, in real life, Evelyn Waugh was a scholarship lad at Hertford College, Oxford, but in his Brideshead Revisited, his alter ego Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte are students at Christ Church, Oxford. Christ Church traditionally had the highest rate of undergrads failing their finals, which was proudly seen as a mark of social distinction.

94 comments:

AlexT
said...

Your vague impressions are almost all correct. The one exception: The pre-eminent college at Oxford is Christ Church, not Balliol. Christ Church's school chapel is the cathedral seat of the anglican bishop of oxford. Doesn't get much swankier than that. It should be noted that the traditional feeder prep school for Trinity is Eton. That's pretty swank too!

Jawaharlal's devotion to the [Indian] national cause was unexpected, since he had long seemed little more than a dilettante. Born in 1889, he was brought up in the Anand Bhavan, or Abode of Bliss, the most palatial mansion in Allahabad. It was set in ten acres of luxuriant gardens complete with tennis courts, riding ring, indoor swimming pool and a courtyard fountain filled with ice and flowers that cooled and scented the whole house during the hot weather. He was surrounded by nurses, servants, governesses and tutors. His doting mother indulged him while his fiercely possessive father intimidated him. A Kashmiri Brahmin by origin, Motilal was determined that 'the boy' should be educated like an English gentleman and should enter that nirvana of respectability, the Indian Civil Service. So in 1905 Jawaharlal went to Harrow, where he was pursued by paternal exhortations to excel, not least in the matter of growing a moustache. He looked a fool without one, said Motilal, who himself sported a Kitcheneresque appendage at the time. But Jawaharlal had no more success in this respect than did his fellow Harrovian, Winston Churchill, and he soon shaved off the callow growth with the plea that it was 'all awry and it spoils the whole look of the face'.

He scarcely made any other mark at school and proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge, where his career was also undistinguished. In fact, Jawaharlal lived the life of a young man of fashion, running up debts for Savile Row suits and Montmatre jaunts. There were signs of a political bent: he admired Sinn Fein, listened to Bernard Shaw and questioned his father's faith in John Bull. But Jawaharlal was a study in aimlessness and he got such a poor degree that he was unable to enter the ICS [Indian Civil Service]. He toyed with other options, telling Motilal that he wanted to read law at 'a decent Oxford college' because Cambridge was 'too full of Indians'.

I grew up in the Oxfordshire Cotswolds. I can assure you the Chipping Norton Set are hated by the great majority of people who actually hale from Chipping Norton.

The constituency is actually Witney, or West Oxfordshire. If you to the area on vacation, Bampton and the Gloucester Cotwolds are better. Bampton is nice because it hasn't been colonised by the Green Wellie Brigade.

Britain is no longer a democracy. It does not even pretend to have freedom of speech. Up until now, the only people who have been prosecuted for Islamophobic hate speech have been minnows. Sooner or later, they are doing to have to make an example of someone more high profile.

Trinity is probably not considered the most aristocratic college at Cambridge, at least not now: it is probably the most distinguished, but is also several times larger than almost all other colleges (bar St John's).

Cambridge also has a marginally better record in producing poets than Oxford.

"An Emeritus Fellow at New College, Oxford, Professor Dawkins appeared to try and appease his critics by saying that Trinity College also has more Nobel Prizes than any country in the world except America, Britain, Germany and France."

ha, i was about to say. so much for the chinese geniuses. though as i've argued many times before, i definitely do not consider nobel science prizes to be the last word on intellectual achievement.

they have their place, but they don't tell the whole story, not by a long shot. they are definitely not all made equally. some are awarded for very important work, others for stuff that has much less application. also, science nobels have become...debatable, in the last decade or so. definitely some head scratchers every other year or so now. and other work of nobel science award caliber which is continuously ignored.

science nobels cannot simultaneously be used to both prove superior intelligence (look at how many science nobels ashkenazi jews have won! see, it PROVES they are smartest!) yet at the same time not prove anything (the chinese almost never win science nobels so that proves...er...we'll get back to you).

Dawkins is right, but for the wrong reasons. Arabs/Pakistanis/Indonesians/African Muslims could all turn into atheists tomorrow, they wouldn't get any smarter. Islam is only the cause to the extent that it created selective pressures for lower intelligence. If the Arabs were smart, they'd have a smarter religion.

Semi-related: Peter Frost says the Mideast's white slave trade led to the wealthy having whiter concubines and harems. What kind of genetic legacy did that leave. Off hand, one would expect the upper classes in the mideast to be considerably more European than the masses. I'm not sure if they took women from bright areas of Europe, but if they did their descendants might have an IQ advantage. Possibly explaining why they tend towards dictatorships and oligarchy.

Dawkins had better be careful. First, he makes that comment to the third-tier feminist-atheist blogger who was felt she had been verbally raped in an elevator by a guy who basically asked her for a date...and now this. The lefties are going to kick him off the good team.

It would be interesting to compare/contrast Oxford/Cambridge vs Harvard/Yale to see various aspects of UK vs US elite university systems.

My impression is that the UK Oxbridge system is much more dominant in British society than the Ivies in the US. The UK is small enough to get much of the national talent into two universities, where they all meet each other.

Winners from Trinity include Bertrand Russell who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his 1946 work, ‘A History of Western Philosophy’.

I didn't know Russell had won a Nobel in Literature for that book. I imagine the Nobel was awarded more as a lifetime achievement award and recognition rather than specifically because of that book. I enjoyed the book but it's a pop style summary of philosophy and it has errors and misrepresentations. It's not a groundbreaking work or anything like that.

Now Pulitzers on the other hand...which even Jared Diamond received for his PC 'guns, germs & steel' which assumes all new guineans are smarter than all white people because he knew a smart new guinean, & which bashed the entire psychometrics field, pretending it has been "debunked" b/c he knew (without data/research) that its intent was evil. PC-ness earns Pulitzers & Nobel Peace prizes. Guess Richard Dawkins won't get any of those from now on.

Of the two Muslim scientists, Pakistan doesn't even consider one of them to be a Muslim. Salam was an Ahmadiyya, a sect officially listed as heretics by the Pakistani constitution. He left Pakistan after that amendment was passed.

also, science nobels have become...debatable, in the last decade or so. definitely some head scratchers every other year or so now. and other work of nobel science award caliber which is continuously ignored.

Can you point to any of the "head scratchers" and which work is "continuously ignored"?

dawkins is also remarkably ignorant on theology, metaphysics, history and ethno-religious conflict.

this is from his website:Imagine, sang John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Kashmir dispute, no Indo/Pakistan partition, no Israel/Palestine wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no Northern Ireland 'troubles'.how much ignorance can you pack into one sentence?

One wrote: ‘Dawkins spent the best part of 10 years attacking Christianity and not raising an eyebrow. He now turns that same eye on Islam and uproar.’

In defense of Dawkins' critics, the whole point of attacking Christianity was not to critique religion but to displace certain Christians--come to think of it, their whole point in defending Islam is to displace certain Christians.Consistent on down the line.

worth nothing muslims never really were 'intellectual' - most of the translators and architects, scholars and artisans were nestorian christians and enslaved europeans - muslims enslaved 1-3 million - an unskilled man or a norblem (man) might be ransomed, a beautiful white woman would never be, nor any skilled artisan such as a metalsmith.

sadly even the guns that brought down constantinople were made by a european mercenary

I've long suspected that the Arab World's decline in mathematical and scientific achievement can be traced to a significant increase in sub-Saharan DNA in their collective admixture. There are not that many distinctly black populations in the modern Arab world, so it's very likely that the largest slave importer in the world practiced lots of miscegination and absorbed many of their characteristics of their slaves until it reached a tipping point.

And this deserves inclusion in the article why? Not one whit of an attempt to refute Dawkins' claim, merely an emotional outburst on par intellectually with a patellar spasm.

Is there any better example of the infantilization of journalism than including some random Twitter post in a supposedly serious article? This would be the equivalent of reporting "One man was overheard muttering to himself 'This man disgusts me' at Joe's Coffee Shop in Hoboken, NJ as he was reading the paper yesterday" in the pre-smart phone era.

p.s. What Troll either doesn't recall or doesn't know was that in the late 70's/early 80's hip hop was as much about the d.j.'s who would mix and scratch and breakdancing as it was about rapping. And FWIW, rapping goes back to what was called "toasting" in reggae music. Anyway, hip hip, before gangsta rap, was much more positive. Breakdancing was considered an alternative to fighting for gang members.

Gangta rap is a blight on humanity. There is nothing positive about it. At best it's a nuisance.

also, science nobels have become...debatable, in the last decade or so. definitely some head scratchers every other year or so now. and other work of nobel science award caliber which is continuously ignored.

There are 3 science Nobels - physics, chem, and med - so over the past decade, 30 science Nobels have been awarded. If there were "definitely some head scratchers every other year or so" over the past decade, this would suggest that something like 10 to 15 out of the 30 past science Nobels were "definitely...head scratchers". That's 33% to 50%. Quite a significant amount. So which were they?

"Dawkins? Jokes on him. SWPL are still religious. They just worship Muslims etc."

Dawkins has his beliefs too, aparently: among them, that there are no differences in average intelligence between different groups. Otherwise, why troll Muslims about their paucity of Nobelists? He implies that their religion explains their poor performancevbut a look at the average IQ estimates in Muslim countries suggests otherwise.

Dawkins could've pissed them off even more by pointing out how most of those Muslim scientists from the Middle Ages were Persians, not Arabs.

I think the Arabs did well in lit and philosophy in those days, but the leaders in math, science, medicine, etc. -- those guys were mostly Persians, including everybody's favorite example, Al-Khwarizmi.

Even conservative anti-multi-culti people have fallen for the big lie, conceding the point that Arabs did OK way back when, but not recently. Show a little more curiosity, folks -- the Arabs weren't brainiacs even in ye olden tymes.

In Dawkins's case, although he is a prominent atheist, he sounded as if he said it as a White boy and not as an atheist. I wonder if it would have been received differently if he used "Islam" instead of "Muslims".

11* This was a tough call, but it seems either group could say anything about the other and no one would give a crap.

Islam does not seem to be very keen on Nobel laureates: Abdus Salam, one of the architects of modern theory, felt as a Moslem. But he was an Ahmadiyya (google is your friend, if you are interested in the finer points of islamic theology) - and a constitutional change in Pakistan made him a non-Muslim.

Originally the headstone on his grave praised him as the "first muslim Nobel laureate". Zealots in Pakistan insisted on erasing the "muslim" in the text, so now he is the "first Nobel laureate". See e.g. http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/unification_of_forces_the_muslim_the_atheist_and_the_higgs/

So it seems to me that more liberal Westerners are offended than Muslims themselves: They disavow one of the fundamental contributors to 20th century physics for some theological disagreement. So I do not think they regard Nobel prizes as some desirable achievement.

also, science nobels have become...debatable, in the last decade or so. definitely some head scratchers every other year or so now. and other work of nobel science award caliber which is continuously ignored.

There are 3 science Nobels - physics, chem, and med - so over the past decade, 30 science Nobels have been awarded. If there were "definitely some head scratchers every other year or so" over the past decade, this would suggest that something like 10 to 15 out of the 30 past science Nobels were "definitely...head scratchers". That's 33% to 50%. Quite a significant amount. So which were they?

As others have already pointed out, its hypocritical of mainstream muslims to count Abdus Salam as one of them since as an Ahmadi he would be regarded as a heretic.

Other not unrelated trivia, Ferid Murad (1998 Nobel in Medicine/Physiology) was born in the US to a white American mother and muslim Albanian father. Notably, the family converted to Christianity to assimilate better into US society (yes, you read that right). What was the likelihood of him ending up as a Nobelist had he remained a "submitter"?

Another Nobelist, Peter Medawar (1960 Nobel in Medicine/Physiology) was of Lebanese Maronite Christian ancestry. This equals the entire haul of science Nobels awarded to pukka Muslims.

Chipping Norton isn't quite as delightful as you paint it (was there in 2011), there are far nicer villages in the Cotswolds but its still worth visiting just for the Rollright Stones.

Both of my kids went to the Comm School at UVa. Thanks for mentioning it in such rarefied company. It is one of the last selective universities that is not overwhelmed by Cultural Marxism. The conniving Marxists are there but not in control...yet. But the long knives are out for UVa, the old guard of old white guys are dying and wheezing, and this misstep with the fat new female President is the perfect excuse to yell "You are Guilty" in a crowded theater. Look for UVa students, in the next ten years, to start wearing "Benefactor of White Privilege" tee-shirts (in Capital letters) rather than those pink button down Oxford cloth atavistic prep shirts. Wahoo Wah.

C-ville and Uva seem like a museum to our former ruling class, the Wasps, with their clean prep shirts and nice manners. It had remained that way long beyond the time when the rest of the American higher education had gone politically and guiltily correct because, remember UVa is a Confederate school or was. Right outside the first year dorms('first year' get it? we are different) is the Cemetery to the Confederate War Dead. It is hard to dig these guys up and transfer them to a potter's field without someone noticing.

"Up until 1888, the official colors of the university were gray and red, in honor of those soldiers that had worn the former and spilled the latter. The switch to blue and orange, seemingly arbitrary, did not go uncontested, especially among the old guard. "

So in spite of all the superficial waspiness, there was an anomalous element of FU circling about UVa. Alas I think that will be expunged soon and UVa will fall in line chanting the Marxist Old School Song for white kids, "We are guilty and deserve to disappear."

University College at Oxford is also fairly distinguished---pretty sure the poet Shelly went there, among others. Then there's All Souls which doesn't take undergrads but is a plum position for scholars.

Has Dawkins actually made any important scholarly contributions to evolutionary theory, or is he mostly a public intellectual and popularizer?

Why is it "bigotry" to say the truth? The claim that Muslims have won less Nobel prizes then the school could easily be verified or proven false. If the statement is true, why is it "bigotry"?

Racists will seek out facts that make liberals uncomfortable. Who but a racist knows too many uncomfortable facts about race? Or insists on mentioning them?

Did you just get here from Mars?

Of course it's *true*. You're just not supposed to *say* it. It's in poor taste to notice that we're not all equal.

I know you're being facetious (or I hope). Hell, I just did the same thing. But let's be tediously forthright for a moment and acknowledge that the dictates of taste and decorum are now squarely opposed to those of justice and morality; insisting that advertising exculpatory evidence is tactless when a man's on trial is unjust and immoral. Libs waved goodbye to the morality of the equality delusion when they started folding it into the prosecution's case against whites. In short, if libs wanted to maintain their delusion that the delusion of equality is moral, they shouldn't have accused whites of causing black failure.

And this deserves inclusion in the article why? Not one whit of an attempt to refute Dawkins' claim, merely an emotional outburst on par intellectually with a patellar spasm.

Libs love "arguing" that this argument or that one makes their tummies hurt. They've gotten so used to it that they don't even know they're highlighting their own deficiencies and calling them arguments.

Muslims are second only to Blacks and above gays in sacredness.

Wrong. Arabs and middle easterners are second only to white "gentiles" in their "lampoon often" status in the media. They're near the bottom of the totem pole. Arabs and middle easterners are too closely associated with Islam for your statement to make sense.

The fact that American-Americans feel more free to insult and denigrate Arabs (and other middle eastern populations) than any other group besides their own says it all.

Probably number one in Europe

True, the hierarchy is different in Europe. Muslims are the worst there, so liberals defend them the most. Good generals always go by facts on the ground.

"Why is it "bigotry" to say the truth? The claim that Muslims have won less Nobel prizes then the school could easily be verified or proven false. If the statement is true, why is it "bigotry"?"

Bigotry here really means "not sporting."

As Chris Rock says, you don't call double dribble on the retarded kid. Yes, it is true that he did double dribble, but it isn't sporting because he is so far below in ability that he can't do anything about it.

Just iamgine, if you willthat Islam had truimphed at the Battle of Tours and turned all of Europe raging green Islamic. Imagine, if you will that the enlightenmemt, and all that flowed from it, ( eg modern medicine, electricity, Newton, steam engines, refrigeration, piped water and waste water disposal, computers eetc etc etc), never happened - which would *undoubtedbly* would have been the case. Then we would all still be living at the same standard as an 8th century peasant/bedouin. Most likely we'd die at age 40 and the world would only hold a few hundred million of us. You'd be walking home tonight from your distant fields, for some well earned rest in your hovel, drawing a bucket of water from a likely infected well and making a repast on a log fire out of some distinctly unappetizng ingredints, and then it's straight off to sleep as the sun falls, and so you change out of your one set of clothes and try as best you can to wash out of a bucket of water.And so it continues year after year.

Found it quite laughable to claim algebra had anything to do with Islam. Algebra predates Islam by thousands of years, and was the outcome of years of study and exchange between Egyptians and Greeks. To claim something for a culture that well predates a religious movement as part of said religion is embarrassing racial cheerleading. Nobody would call early Roman, Greek nor Viking cultural developments Christian simply because those cultures adopted Christianity centuries later. Yet in his Islam/Egypt speech The One did so without anyone calling him on it.

Cambridge, today, also is in real danger of upsetting the balance of power with its West Country cousin. Thanks to its predominance in STEM over Oxford, the endowment at Cambridge has ballooned in the past few decades to dwarf the other by something like 4 to 1.

Trinity College is not quite the preserve of brilliant white Anglo males that some may assume.

Since Sir Martin Ryle won the physics prize in 1974, Walter Gilbert was the only indigenous Briton affiliated with Trinity College to have won a Nobel Prize in a real science (Chemistry, 1980).

The other Trinity scholars to win a Nobel science prize since 1974 (Pyotr Kapitsa, Sir Aaron Klug, Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan) are among the fine non-indigenously British people who increasingly occupy the main places of power and privilege in Britain's multi-culti, mass-immigration society.

On a totally different subject, someone (American?) is one day going to have to explain to me (British) the value of an Ivy League education qua education vs. an Oxbridge one. Whatever you think of eg Niall Ferguson, at Oxford, undergraduate you sat alone in a room with him for an hour plus each week of term to discuss *your* essay. This - and zero old world snobbery agin Harvard et al is implied here - is, uh, different from what I understand goes on an Ivy pace undergraduates and bigfoot academics.

've long suspected that the Arab World's decline in mathematical and scientific achievement can be traced to a significant increase in sub-Saharan DNA in their collective admixture. There are not that many distinctly black populations in the modern Arab world, so it's very likely that the largest slave importer in the world practiced lots of miscegination and absorbed many of their characteristics of their slaves until it reached a tipping point.They conquered the old Persian and Byzantine empires and as mention the DNA was different in the middle ages.8/20/13, 8:36 PM

I love how the reporter says well Muslims have more this century, even though they admit that only 2 out of 10 were in scientific fields. Those two by the way were in 1979 and 1999. So all those Muslim Nobel winners this century are either Peace or Lit winners. The Peace winners are voted in by the Norwegian Parliament, unlike the other 5 there is no academic committee to chose, just a nomination by a government official somewhere in the world to put it to a vote. That's why Obama could win a Nobel Peace Prize for being elected.

If Oxbridge graduates loads of smart peepul who go on to become the eeleet of British society, why isn't the U.K. a better place?

Probably because as Steve as pointed out before: The British working class is a lot more left-wing and militant than their American, Australian, and Canadian cousins are. Heavily working class areas of Britain like Wales, Scotland, and Northern England are still bastions of the Labour Party, long after similar parts of the US have gone from Democrat to GOP. Labour's support is more union based than their opposite numbers in those British spinoff societies as well. It's also were a lot of the far left people in Labour hail from, the people that nearly killed the party in the late 1970's and 1980's. The elites needed their votes and therefore pandered to their socialistic beliefs for about a third of a century, from 1946-79. This not coincidentally was when Britain was referred to as the "Sick man of Europe " and the years of 1978-79 as the " Winter of Discontent "

Couldn't somebody at least have counted up the Nobels won by Jews/Israelis? Or would that have taken too long? I think it might be more than two (or one, if you throw the Pakistani heretic under the bus).

Can you point to any of the "head scratchers" and which work is "continuously ignored"?

nope. i do this enough in other threads.

"There are 3 science Nobels - physics, chem, and med - so over the past decade, 30 science Nobels have been awarded. If there were "definitely some head scratchers every other year or so" over the past decade, this would suggest that something like 10 to 15 out of the 30 past science Nobels were "definitely...head scratchers". That's 33% to 50%. Quite a significant amount. So which were they?"

a head scratcher every other year or so would indicate 1 award every 2 years that is questionable. that means 5 awards in the last 10 years. and yeah. there have been. out of the last 30 awards, there is a head scratcher every other year or so now. and more frequently as time goes on.

this is because the prizes are required to be awarded every year, without fail - they HAVE to award a prize every year. but often there's nothing of nobel science prize importance happening every single year in every field. so they are forced to pick...something.

think of sports drafts or the yearly race for the MVP. think of grammy awards. think of academy awards. think of anything which is REQUIRED to happen yearly, and which leads people to compare one year to another. "Oh that was a weak year. Look at a strong year - the winner in year x would not even be in the top 5 in year z". and so on and so forth.

it would be better if the prizes were awarded every 2 years or even every 4 years like the fields medal. that weeds out the questionable stuff and eliminates the head scratchers. yearly awards can quickly exhaust the important stuff and leave you scraping the bottom of the barrel.

plus, now they are straight up ignoring some stuff. this is no different, again, than sports drafts or the academy awards. great players slipping into the second round or beyond, the academy hating particular directors or actors and snubbing them repeatedly.

dawkins should have excluded the other nobels, they are too subjective or political. barack obama was awarded the nobel peace prize. their credibility was eliminated.

No, you don't. You mostly talk about fracking, sports, and Obama. I don't think you've ever specified the "head scratchers" and the work which is "continuously ignored". If you have, point them out.

this is because the prizes are required to be awarded every year, without fail - they HAVE to award a prize every year. but often there's nothing of nobel science prize importance happening every single year in every field. so they are forced to pick...something.

We get this. This is obvious. But the question is which ones were the "definite head scratchers" that you assert. 5 over the past decade is a large number of "definite head scratchers". You should be able to specify them. It's large enough and recent enough.

"Ive long suspected that the Arab World's decline in mathematical and scientific achievement can be traced to a significant increase in sub-Saharan DNA in their collective admixture. There are not that many distinctly black populations in the modern Arab world, so it's very likely that the largest slave importer in the world practiced lots of miscegination and absorbed many of their characteristics of their slaves until it reached a tipping point.They conquered the old Persian and Byzantine empires and as mention the DNA was different in the middle ages."

That seems right to me. They castrated the male black slaves and bred with the females and accepted the children since in a highly patriarchial system, female ancestry doesn't matter. Except that it does...

I think Portugal has had some of the same issues given their fall from the top of Europe to the bottom.

Anon.: "My impression is that the UK Oxbridge system is much more dominant in British society than the Ivies in the US"

Generally speaking this is true, but a sizeable portion of the UK elite comes from other places, like the University of London (practically a "league" in itself, boasting the LSE and Imperial College among others), the old Scottish universities, and a few other places.

Probably the most socially dominant university that I know of in a non-small country, however, is the University of Tokyo (in particular its law school).

Over many generations, close inbreeding of the type commonly practiced among Arab Muslims (father's brother's daughter) will concentrate harmful alleles. That could lower IQ if to some degree intelligence is related to genetic load. But sub-Saharan admixture could also contribute if one agrees that average sub-Saharan African intelligence was lower than the average intelligence of pre-admixture Muslim Arabs. Genetic studies show clear evidence of significant (10-20%) sub-Saharan admixture in some Arab Muslim populations (Yemenis, Saudis, Egyptians).

Thanks for the correction. So, since Sir Martin Ryle in 1974, no indigenous Brit associated with Trinity College has won a Nobel science prize.

This remarkable failure of the British to dominate their own top technical institution is something Richard Dawkins might usefully address.

It's interesting that the decline in achievement (by Dawkins's measure) since the 1970's follows the takeover by the state of Oxford and Cambridge, which had until then been more or less autonomous privately funded institutions.

With the state takeover, OxBridge became vastly more meritocratic, requiring all A's in the matriculation exams, unless one happened to be an ethnic or a member of the lower class, in which case the benefit of considerable doubt might be extended.

In addition, both schools began taking as many or more women as men, rather than merely having a decorative few of the weaker sex.

As a result, lots of ordinary kids with three or four A's or A-Stars in the matriculation exam have passed through these institutions during the last four decades, mostly graduating with first class honours only to then disappear without trace.

Perhaps Oxford and Cambridge should return to their former independent state and resume their former admissions process which meant having a few old dons pick whom they pleased, mostly boys, from among the assortment of privileged applicants from Eton, etc. plus the odd few very bright lads of more humble estate who ace the scholarship exams.

It would of course help if the dons went back to teaching undergraduates as in the days of C.S. Lewis. Today, so far as I understand from my niece at Cambridge, the undergraduates do not know the names of the top profs., let alone meet with them for tutorials.

then perhaps the we might again see some bright white indigenous British males doing interesting things a the Cavendish lab.

The British left is already frothing at the mouth at Dawkins, saying words to the effect that a Newer and Betterer Atheism will replace Dawkins' apparently racist variety. Some have already tried to expel him from the Atheist tribe for being insufficiently left-wing, i.e. noticing things. The Watsoning at least in Britain has begun. Perhaps he can be brought into our tribe, he has been fending off militant leftist hatred ever since he wrote " The Selfish Gene " back in 1976. They thought it was pre-Thatcher attempt to promote Thatcherism, in retrospect of course.

Probably the most socially dominant university that I know of in a non-small country, however, is the University of Tokyo (in particular its law school).

France is like this as well:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d76b5fcc-b83f-11e2-bd62-00144feabdc0.html

"The French elite is defined by its brains. It’s largely recruited from just two rigidly selective schools: ENA and the Ecole Polytechnique (known to alumni simply as “X”). “Nowhere else in the world does the question of where you go to school so utterly determine your professional career – and the destiny of an entire nation,” writes Peter Gumbel in his new book France’s Got Talent. That’s why some elite members introduce themselves into old age as, for instance, “former pupil of the Polytechnique”."

Sure, he may or may not be right about Islam (and I honestly don't think he's right). However, he's a jerk and a pompous fool who does nothing these days except loudly scream about how there is no God and how anybody who believes in one is a primitive fool and probably doesn't deserve to live.

I think it's funny and hypocritical what's happening to him, but I certainly don't feel bad for him.

Muslims are dumb because they're inbred and tribalistic, not because of "black DNA".

The lack of Muslim achievement is not due to "lack of intelligence". There are 1.2-1.4 billion Muslims in the world and even if a much smaller percentage of them have IQs above 160 than is the case among White Europeans, it still adds up to a lot of people.

The lack of achievement is due to the fact that questioning of religious beliefs in Islamic countries will get you killed. Apostasy and blasphemy are capital offences in Islam. It is very difficult for Westerners who are used to living in a society in which free enquiry has been the norm for centuries to understand how difficult it is for scientific talent to develop in a society that is ruled completely by religious dogma.

As has been pointed out by one or two commenters above, the really belieiving religious Muslims do not even care that they are not represented in science. They regard the word of God (the Quran) as superior to science.

A week ago, John Derbyshire wrote, "A target for the August Two Minutes Hate has not yet been selected. You will be informed." If they've decided they can afford to burn a foot-soldier as useful as Dawkins, I guess that shows how confident they are that they've won.

"Third, there is a growing confidence in the Islamic world that the future belongs to them. Whence comes this confidence?Western peoples are dying, as Muslim populations are exploding and Muslim migrants are pouring into Europe and the United States. While Islam is booming in the East and being welcomed in the West, Christianity is dying in the West and being expelled from the East.It is not unreasonable for Muslim visionaries to see the next 500 years as an era of Islamic ascendancy, as the last 500 saw a Western ascendancy."

Dawkins the evolutionist should know that that breeders beat the readers.

And why pick on Muslims?

Greece used to be great long long ago but stopped being great for the next 2000 yrs. What of any value came out of Greece in the last 2000 yrs?

China's official philosophy was Confucianism, not a religion. But it stopped progressing and became stagnant. And communism is secular but China under Mao produced nothing of value.

"If Oxbridge graduates loads of smart peepul who go on to become the eeleet of British society, why isn't the U.K. a better place?"

The UK used to be in the top five on pretty much every worthwhile metric so i'd assume something dramatic must have changed to explain its very rapid and dramatic disintegration.

One possible factor might be a change in the elite's commonweal quotient or CQ.

From the point of view of a nation's overall health the average IQ of the elite isn't the only factor. It's also what proportion of that IQ is utilized solely for the benefit of the elite and what proportion is applied to the commonweal. I'll define that as the commonweal quotient or CQ .

Now assuming elite's are always mostly selfish the CQs are likely to be low - say a maximum of 10%.

That might mean:

1) an elite with an average IQ of 100 and an average CQ of 10% would devote 10 points of their IQ to the commonweal

while

2) an elite with an average IQ of 120 and an average CQ of 5% would only provide 6 points.

So if a country started as 1) and gradually became 2) the result would be a decline in the health and wealth of the nation as a whole, while at the same time the elite became ever richer.

There could be a lot of reasons for this but i think one will be when unassimilated ethnic minorities become part of a national elite.

(Colonialism would generally work in a similar way.)

Or more broadly say every ethnic group has the same base CQ but it is applied in proportion to their percentage of the total population so say the base human CQ is 10% and you had a country that was made up 60%, 30% and 10% of three different ethnic groups the effective commonweal quotient of the three groups after taking those proportions into account would be 6%, 3% and 1%.

I think this is India's problem for example. The close-marriage extended family culture - which has counter-balancing benefits so it's not all bad - effectively creates thousands of small ethnic groups which means the elites have a higher level of interst in the well-being of their own extended kin network and a lower level of interest in the commonweal of the whole.

I think if you took the IQ data from Wealth of Nations which gives a ranking that roughly maps onto prosperity and could calculate the CQ of each nation then IQ*CQ would give an exact ranking.

So

"Trinity College is not quite the preserve of brilliant white Anglo males that some may assume.

...

The other Trinity scholars to win a Nobel science prize since 1974 (Pyotr Kapitsa, Sir Aaron Klug, Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan) are among the fine non-indigenously British people who increasingly occupy the main places of power and privilege in Britain's multi-culti, mass-immigration society."

Notably, the family converted to Christianity to assimilate better into US society (yes, you read that right).

That makes them heroes in voluntarily joining up to the Borgstablishment and denying their human heritage. Or was someone and some church bribing them? Meanwhile, if a white American man decides to leave the Hive ... I meant flock ... and choose Islam or some other Alien religion just because he feels the right thing to do, never mind any damage to his career and reputation, he becomes a "coward/traitor/villain/devil".

"White people don't have anybody to stand up for them qua white people, but they are also pretty good at standing up for themselves."

That makes no sense whatsoever, Steve.

Time to break out the crayons, Steve.

Video equipment ain't expensive nowadays, Horatio Alger.

Your posts just get more and more useful by the day.

Power Child, black tribalism is a sham. Blacks are, if anything, less tribalistic by nature than whites or yellows. Less collectivist, more individualistic. They're only tribalistic when it's in their personal interests.

as jobs have gotten less stable and media companies have gotten poorer and shakier, the pressure to conform to the narrative has increased.

Interesting. That had never occurred to me, but it's entirely plausible.

Muslims are dumb because they're inbred and tribalistic, not because of "black DNA".

...

This remarkable failure of the British to dominate their own top technical institution is something Richard Dawkins might usefully address.

Open borders. Any wealthy country that allows the entire world to freely compete in its universities will find its natives elbowed out. Israel should try it some time. Hong Kong, too. There is no population with the brain power to outcompete 6 billion people. China, Asia's Europe masquerading as a country, might be the exception, but even there it's more raw numbers than brain power. Just look at Pakistan. It's a dump, and the people aren't smart in general, but there are so many of them, there are enough smart people to do plenty of displacing. And it's not like the local unis are competing with Oxford for the best students.

The British left is already frothing at the mouth at Dawkins, saying words to the effect that a Newer and Betterer Atheism will replace Dawkins' apparently racist variety. Some have already tried to expel him from the Atheist tribe for being insufficiently left-wing, i.e. noticing things. The Watsoning at least in Britain has begun. Perhaps he can be brought into our tribe, he has been fending off militant leftist hatred ever since he wrote " The Selfish Gene " back in 1976. They thought it was pre-Thatcher attempt to promote Thatcherism, in retrospect of course.

Atheists are believers, not skeptics. Skeptics don't actively, even militantly believe and profess that there's no higher power. Agnostics are skeptics. It's not hard to believe that atheists show all the signs of being zealots.

"failure of the British to dominate their own top technical institution is something Richard Dawkins might usefully address.

Open borders. Any wealthy country that allows the entire world to freely compete in its universities will find its natives elbowed out. Israel should try it some time."

The Israelis are way too smart for that. Instead they are opening their universities to American/European/Russian Ashkenazi Jews. They can get the high IQ input but feel as if no one is being displaced. If those Jews stay in Israel, Israel considers it a win.

"The French elite is defined by its brains. It’s largely recruited from just two rigidly selective schools: ENA and the Ecole Polytechnique (known to alumni simply as “X”).

Some brains. Their country is literally overrun with North African muslims who do not recognize the French state, their economy is a disaster, with young educated French leaving in droves. Germany is the master of Europe again and in international affairs, the French voice counts for very little. Their armed forces are pathetic, could not even bomb Libya (an absurd mission to begin with) without begging for US help. The alumni of X and ENA have done quite well, in this I would agree. It is just the country that has done so poorly.

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